> The commission consists of one commissioner per country However they don't work for the country. I guess the closest analogy for the U.S. would be the white

> The commission consists of one commissioner per country However they don't work for the country. I guess the closest analogy for the U.S. would be the white house - but where the president is elected by the electoral college (in the E.U it's by the council, although that's just a rubber stamp based on the party who gets the highest number of votes in the equivelent of House vote) However instead of the president choosing heads of department himself, he gets to choose from 28 people sent from each countries. The "U.S. Senate" equivalent is the council, where every country gets 1 vote, regardless of size. To get things passed through the Council, a double majority needs to happen - both a number (55% of countries I think) and a population (countries representing 65% of the population). This ensures that small countries can't gang up on large ones, and vice versa. Imagine the U.S. senate, where you need 55 votes to pass, and that can't just be from states like Wyoming and Vermont, but would have to include at least a couple of states like California or Florida. Then to pass into law, it also has to pass through the MEPs, who represent the voters of the EU (rather than the governments), in a roughly proportional manner.